Inferences
المؤلف:
Paul Warren
المصدر:
Introducing Psycholinguistics
الجزء والصفحة:
P202
2025-11-11
13
Inferences
Successful comprehension depends on the listener or reader making inferences about the discourse situation, i.e. understanding more than the surface meaning of sentences. Consider the exchange in (12.13) -(12.14).
The ticket agent has made an inference that the man asked about the next train to Palmerston North because he wants to go to Palmerston North, and a further inference that he wants to get to Palmerston North as soon as possible. But neither of these things was actually stated by the man. If this inference is wrong, e.g. if the man wants to see off somebody who he knows is getting the next train to Palmerston North, for instance, then the additional information in the ticket agent’s response is irrelevant. If however the inference is correct, then the man may continue the discourse as in (12.15).
Notice that his use of the expression the faster the train depends on the way in which the prior discourse has unfolded. If this has been his first request, then the ticket agent would not necessarily know which train he wanted a ticket for.
Inferences based on the preceding discourse are important for our successful and efficient processing of sentences, including the grammatical relations between elements within and across sentences. In a cross-modal naming study, Tyler and Marslen-Wilson (1982) found that listeners very rapidly use their understanding of the preceding discourse, and inferences based on this understanding, to sort out which protagonists are likely to be the subject and object of incomplete phrases like Running towards … The researchers presented to their participants spoken passages like (12.16), ending with one of the spoken fragments in (12.17),( 12.18) or (12.19). At the offset of this fragment the participants saw one of the visual probe words HIM or HER for reading aloud naming.
The grammatical subject of a in the fragment in (12.17) is an explicit repetition of Philip from the preceding discourse. In (12.18), the subject is he, and the preceding discourse has only one male protagonist, Philip. In both these cases it should therefore be obvious that HIM is an inappropriate continuation word after … towards, while HER is appropriate. In (12.19) there is no explicit subject in the fragment, but the logical inference from the preceding discourse is that it would similarly be Philip who is running, and that the most appropriate object of the preposition towards is again HER. Tyler and Marslen-Wilson’s results showed that the inappropriate probe word HIM was responded to more slowly than the appropriate word HER for all three continuations in (12.17), (12.18) and (12.19), and that there was no difference in the patterns of results shown by participants in the three conditions. In other words, when the fragment is (12.19), the participants are able to make the logical inference that the argument structure of ran will include her rather than him as the object of towards. What is more, they do this as efficiently in this condition as they do when the subject of is made explicit.
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